To The Dark I Return
by dru.solis
Summary: VPM fanfic through the eyes of a Shinma. I wrote this shortly after watching the OVAs, which was probably about 4 years ago.
1. Chapter 1

With a faint breathing of the wind I feel myself rise from the ash covered darkness of the old world. I am the tired and aching muscles that hurt far too much to stretch. I am the bitter chills that tickle the spines of the old. I am the exhausted eyelids of the young, longing for sleep, yet too afraid to close and accept the twilight. I am the hemophiliac's reminder of blood and a victim's undying memory. I am a Shinma and nothing more.

A Shinma? Yes. A Shinma. Not a demon and not a god. I cannot be defined in any mortal word. I breathe in panic, exhale alarm. Horror is my food and fear is my tea. I am not malicious and I am not bad. There is no deranged pleasure that I derive from the pain I inflict from my feeding. I receive sustenance and nothing more.

I know not from where my insatiable hunger flows. I know only of its inevitability -- its ever growing and all consuming presence. It does not let me rest; nor does any of my voracious feeding take away its edge. It taunts me, urging me to find another and another and another. It matters not whether I need the energy and the strength from my prey; it demands and I must deliver. It is all I have ever known.

Now, the hunger is once again upon me; I must answer its call. Weakened from my fasting, I hurried down the darkening alleyways and forsaken buildings, floating silently and swiftly on the east side of town. It is among the shady and the desolate, the dingy cardboard shelters and dirty streets that I find my best prey. In the sordid and abandoned city of the night, there is much to fear; I simply have to wait.

There. My fortune has taken the form of a young boy, half covered in a dark layer of dirt and grime. A dreary baseball cap laid backwards on his head, hiding the dirty mat of hair within its sweaty confines. He wore little more than soiled rags, torn and shredded through years of surviving on the streets, eating garbage, sleeping beneath paper much too thin to offer warmth, and having rats his only company besides the darkness and the rain. He huddled deep in a shadowy corner, shivering as he reached out to the dusty ground where a half-eaten hot dog laid. A small rat squealed out in alarm, escaping the boy's shooing hand by dodging into a deep hole in the wall. With painful slowness, the boy gently dusted off the discarded hot dog and proceeded to bite into the cleaner end. His lips moved mechanically, as though he were only a robot designed to chew and nothing else.

Behind his dull eyes there is nothing. There is no movement or thought. No sparkle comes from his face and I know. I know that, like me, there is nothing for him but hunger, a daily battle that is rarely won. I crouched down beside him undetected and looked down into his dying face.

Dear boy, I almost said. How ironic that such two different beings can share such a fundamental flaw: the inability to live. You are not alive and neither am I. We are simply ghosts, apparitions that at some base level in their brains, people know exist but pretend to not see. We live in the cold and the dark, surviving only on what they throw away. They tossed you out like a ragged, broken doll just as easily as they did that dusty hot dog you feed on now. How ironic. How ironic.

I watched the boy eat silently. There was a mysterious tingling in my body, almost like something was nudging me in the back of my mind. Feed. Feed.

Not yet. Let him finish his last meal. I will go on. There will always be more, but he will never have another chance to feed. Let him be full and satisfied for once. Let him have the one thing I have always wanted but will never have. Let him…let him…

But the hunger was upon me and I could not withstand its fury. I entered his body and took control. At once his body stiffened as his head jerked to attention. His fingers lost their dexterity and the last bite of hot dog slipped from his fingers. He is mine now.

"Show me your fears," I said. "What terrifies you? What are you afraid of?"

A barrage of images pours forth. I selected one and his eyes went wide. He flopped against the wall like a fish out of water, and then he doubled over and clutched his stomach for there was nothing there. He cried out and stared at his hand as it became enveloped in a red dancing flame. The flame lolled upon his arm and licked the skin with a sharp tongue. The skin boiled, became charcoal, and peeled away with the smoke. He threw his head up towards heaven to scream, but there was no sound for the flames have twirled up his body to wrap around his face. To the world he was a lone child, fighting through a nightmare in a corner, but inside there was torment and terror beyond all measure. I fed.

I fed and drank up every ounce of horror that dripped from his sweating brow. The power filled my body with a warmth that was unmatched by even the flames that the boy imagined himself in. I closed my eyes and felt my strength grow, returning to my normal level and beyond. It coursed through my body, filling the void left from days of unwelcomed fasting.

With one last twist of his mind, I wrenched all that he is, was, and would become. The eyes became blank, emptied out as the dim flame was extinguished. I let go and his body fell to the floor with a sickening sound, his eyes white and unnatural. I looked down upon his harden and shriveled body, and I felt the strength that was once his stir within me.

"Sleep," I tell the hollow husk. "Dream and be hungry no more."

With those words said, I drifted to the gaping hole in the wall and looked out at the darkened city, illuminated by hopes as artificial as the light in the office windows. As I left I could hear the soft padding of tiny clawed feet cautiously treading across a room. There were a few tentative sniffs and then a sound like a dozen autumn leaves whisked upon the ground by a lusty wind as the rat raced back to its hole, dragging a small piece of a hot dog.


	2. Chapter 2

There was something out there, waiting in the darkness, following my footsteps. I have felt it now for three days. A tingling, a chill, a whisper. Whatever it was, it was fast and relentless. I quickened my steps and shrouded myself in darkness. It followed still, so I quickly erected a veil of fear between my hunter and myself. The veil, when touched, will invoke a terror unlike any other felt in the world. I listened intently as I hurried down the alleyways. There. I heard the sound of the veil being breached, and a horde of silent shadows rushed past me to surround that which disturbed their rest. The sound of pursuit stopped. I ran on.

And then, there was a horrible cry, a wailing of lost souls who have somehow found themselves bathed in light. They looked upon themselves and despair. Their weeping was cut short by something darker and more terrible than they were. The pursuit continued; we raced on into the night.

I drew upon my power and reached out to the thing that was chasing me. It was a whirlwind, a crashing of waves, a suffering and turmoil. For a moment I was overwhelmed. I had never sensed so much pain and sorrow in one being before. Before I could probe deeper, I perceived another presence in the immediate area. There was a quick flash of light that slashed through the darkness and my connection was severed. The psionic backlash sapped away my strength and I fell to the ground. For the first time in my existence, I was powerless. For the first time in my existence, as I laid upon the cold and dirty street, I knew true fear.

She appeared before me, silently floating above the dirty street, as I knelt upon the ashy street struggling to get to my feet. She was small, so small; at my full height I would have dwarf her, but I could not rise. I looked up at her in a pose not unlike a man trembling before his god as she landed softly upon the ground and was still.

She looked down at me with eyes of sorrow and of hate. They were a fiery gold and deep. Her rich mahogany hair was put up in a small bun on the left side of her head, encircled with a long red ribbon that flowed out from the beneath the dark curls to play with the thick rope of braided hair that hung down to her waist. She was dressed in a plain white kimono that ended shortly past the middle of her thighs. Wrapped loosely around her waist was a dark purple obi.

"You do not belong in this world, Shinma," she said in a cold voice. "You know that."

"No more than you," I managed to say. "We are but two sides of the same coin. The only difference is that you hide yourself beneath a veil of beauty and innocence. You have deluded yourself into believing that you save them from a more terrible fate. You are worse than us. We do not hide the fact that we feed upon their bodies and minds to survive. When you feed, you feed off of their misplaced trust, their ignorance of what you really are."

She gasped and drew back against the onslaught of my words. Her face was one of horror, pain, and then finally of righteous anger. "Enough, Shinma," she cried out in the darkness as she cast her hands up to the heavens. Lightning seemed to discharge from her open hands as a fire suddenly ignited above her palm. She brought the flame down to the level of her shoulder, throwing half of her face into a well of shadows, and spoke in a low and barely controlled voice. "You speak of things you do not know. I make a compromise: eternal life for eternal life. I have set them above the pain and the suffering of this world."

I smiled at her as I stood. "So do I."

"You lie!" she shouted, hurling the glowing ball at me.

I quickly dodged aside, casting a swarm of tiny darts in her direction. She raised her arms and they broke before her in a shower of sparkling lights. I swept my hand around me and a forest of dark and twisted trees broke through the cracked pavement. I pointed at my hunter before leaping away onto a nearby building, and the branches scuttled towards her.

With a simple wave of her hand, my creations were laid to waste by a terrible torrent of fire. She turned to look at me. "You'll have to do better than that," she said with an almost girlish giggle.

I did. I dove into her, plunged deep within her mind and embedded myself deep in her core. She fell to her knees and weakly clutched at her throbbing head. She arched her back and cried out in pure, unadulterated anguish. Had I not been fighting for my very existence, I would have taken more time to enjoy the music. This was not the time or place though, and so I wretched and pulled on the various strings I found within her, listening to her screams echo in the deep recesses of her mind. And suddenly, amidst her cries of pain, a name is called out. "Larva!" she shouts. "Larva!"

There was a rushing of cold wind and I knew my time was short. A foreign presence laid a commanding hand upon my prey's convulsing form and attempted to purge me from her body. A tingling filled my body, and my hands, black as midnight, twitched and moved on their own accord. They loosened and let go of her mind, and I was ripped loose. My physical body materialized again, weak and drained. There was no escape this time.

Released from my control, the young girl was gently brought to her feet by a pair of ghastly white hands. Somewhere behind her I could make out the frame of a tall figure shrouded in shadows and a dark black cloak. The cloak billowed in the strong wind, wrapping itself around the girl who was quickly recovering from my intrusion. I saw her shake her head a few times, before opening her eyes again. A look of burning malevolence filled her amber eyes as she caught sight of me. As if it could read her mind, the figure behind her extended a hand and a great fire erupted behind me.

I turned around and saw my name written in a blaze of glowing characters. "No!" I cried out as a small surge of strength poured through my body.

I leapt at the building, calling upon what little power I could muster to summon the shadows to help me scrub the building, to rub my name from its side. They wouldn't come, they shrank away from the light, leaving me to claw at the building alone. I turned to face the little vampire girl, and I sank down slowly to my knees and offered up my neck. She took a step closer but stayed out of range.

She eyed my exposed jugular suspiciously, but I could see her lips part slightly to run her tongue over her sharp incisors. We both stayed like that for a long time, frozen in that moment for what seemed an eternity. Suddenly, she bowed her head slightly and shook it; the moment was gone. Her accomplice extended a hand and created a fireball that it held out to her. She looked at it for a long while before she took it and weighed it in her hand.

I saw her glance in my direction and for a moment I thought I saw her eyes soften. Maybe they did, but it didn't matter. I sensed rather than saw the speeding fireball that was hurled at me. I cried out when it hit me, not because it hurt, but because it was then that I saw the great door yawn open. I saw them, those that I sought asylum from. I saw the nightmarish beings and their beastly forms twist and reach out for me, and I screamed.

My skin had begun to molt and dissolve into the air. Every dark layer that peeled away carried a part of my essence back to that desecrated world of black and red. I closed my eyes tightly as the figures came closer and closer. I could feel their fiery breath, their sharp and barbed tongues, and heard their gnashing teeth. The girl's chilling laughter faded and melted into the wicked chuckle of hellish beings. On the thin air hung the wailing of a thousand damned souls. Gnarled tree branches clawed at me, tearing into my old, scaled body.

Behind me the gateway closed and darkness descended upon me.


End file.
